Eric S. Lander, PhD

Member, Whitehead Institute Professor of Biology, MIT 617.252.1906 phone 617.258.0903 fax lander@broad.mit.edu

A former Member of Whitehead Institute and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Eric S. Lander is one of the driving forces behind today’s revolution in genomics, the study of all of the genes in an organism and how they function together in health and disease [ molecular biology today 220 kbps QuickTime].

Lander was a world leader of the international Human Genome Project, the effort to map the blueprint for a human being. Under his leadership, the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research (which formed the core of the Broad Institute) was responsible for developing many of the key tools of modern mammalian genomics and was the leading contributor to the Human Genome Project.

Today, Lander is using the knowledge of the human genome to tackle the fundamental issue of medicine: to find the causes versus the symptoms of disease. He believes this will take comprehensive attacks. It entails understanding all of the genes and the gene products and how they work in the cell, looking at the circuits in which they work, and understanding the genetic variation in the population. Doing so requires cooperation across scientific disciplines from basic biology to chemistry, and from basic science to clinical science, as well as collaboration across institutions.

Lander’s group recently launched a revolution in the study of human genetic variation, through its own research, and participation in larger projects devoted to the question. He has also led the efforts to develop many new analytical and laboratory techniques for studying complex genetic traits in human, animal and plant populations and for creating a molecular taxonomy of cancer. These techniques have been applied to a broad range of common diseases, including cancer, diabetes, inflammatory diseases and many other less common genetic illnesses.

Lander received his PhD in mathematics from Oxford in 1981, as a Rhodes Scholar. He joined Whitehead Institute in 1986 and founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in 1990. Lander became the founding director of the newly created Broad Institute in 2003. The Broad is a collaboration of MIT, Harvard University and affiliated hospitals, and Whitehead Institute. It is aimed at creating comprehensive tools for genomic medicine and pioneering their application to propel the understanding and treatment of disease. He is also a professor of biology at MIT and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.

Selected Publications

M. Kellis, N. Patterson, M. Endrizzi, B. Birren, and E.S. Lander. (2003). Sequencing and comparison of yeast species to identify genes and regulatory elements. Nature 423: 241–254.

Mootha VK, Bunkenborg J, Olsen JV, Hjerrild M, Wisniewski JR, Stahl E, Bolouri MS, Ray HN, Sihag S, Kamal M, Patterson N, Lander ES, Mann M. (2003). Integrated analysis of protein composition, tissue diversity, and gene regulation in mouse mitochondria. Cell 115(5):629–640.

Mootha VK, Lepage P, Miller K, Bunkenborg J, Reich M, Hjerrild M, Delmonte T, Villeneuve A, Sladek R, Xu F, Mitchell GA, Morin C, Mann M, Hudson TJ, Robinson B, Rioux JD, Lander ES. (2003). Identification of a gene causing human cytochrome c oxidase deficiency by integrative genomics. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 100(2):605–610.

Ramaswamy S, Ross KN, Lander ES, Golub TR. (2003). A molecular signature of metastasis in primary solid tumors. Nat Genet 33(1):49–54.

Waterston RH, Lindblad-Toh K, Birney E, et al. (2002). Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium. Initial sequencing and comparative analysis of the mouse genome. Nature 420(6915):520–562.

International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium: E.S. Lander, et al. (2001). Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome. Nature 409: 860–921.

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